You don't hear the term hypergrowth quite as much as you did a couple years ago.Sure, you might hear it any given week, but you might open up Techmeme and not see it,which is a monumental return to a kinder, gentler past. (Or perhaps we're just unicorning now.) Fortunately for engineering managers…

‘While there aren’t actually more homeless people than there have been in the past, the gentrification of San Francisco has had a severe effect on the homeless.’Photograph: David Levene for the Guardian I t’s an empirical fact: San Francisco is a crappier place to live these days. Sightings of human…

Supported by Kavanaugh and the Blackout Theory It is both easy and common to drink, act and then have no memory of it. Ms. Hepola is the author of the best-selling memoir “Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget.” College students drinking at a tailgate party before an Indiana University…

At 6:30 a.m. on Sunday, April 29, 2018, a group of ten skiers set out from a secluded mountain hut more than 9,000 feet up in the Swiss Alps . Perched on the top of a rocky hill surrounded by towering peaks and mountainsides, the Dix hut is a quirky, three-story stone building with a beautiful,…

Last week on MBA Mondays I posted about the difference between CFO and VP Finance . In the comments to that post, I was asked about VP Eng vs CTO and I figured that had the makings of a good post too. So here we go. Like VP Finance & CFO, the differences in the two positions are not just about…

For the past several years, I've been thinking a lot about learning science, or the systematic investigation of how we learn. This was fueled by a switch in career trajectories after I graduated college towards software engineering. There's this really intimidating article that I often hesitantly…

“It’s fucked up when your mind’s playin’ tricks on ya” —The Geto Boys By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared to…

Advice for a new executive Originally posted Aug 30, 2018 When I was getting ready to join Kickstarter as VP of Engineering, Chad Dickerson (who was the CEO of Etsy when I worked there) offered to send me a bunch of advice. Chad had been a CTO multiple times before being CEO; he knew that this…

Ben Silbermann, the chief executive of Pinterest, “measures twice, cuts once,” said one early investor in the company. Credit Anastasiia Sapon for The New York Times SAN FRANCISCO — Ben Silbermann does not enjoy being interviewed. He isn’t a fan of speaking at tech industry conferences. Nor does he…

The Promise of Cryptonetworks Today’s web platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter command a great deal of power over their users and third-party developers. They are the aggregators who, by virtue of their stronghold over all user and application data, have control over: each and every…

All the leading web browsers, except for Google Chrome, include a separate “reading mode” that extracts the main content from pages, reformats it to be more readable, and hides distractions like advertisements, comments, and even page navigation. This separate rendering mode isn’t governed by any…

Humans know full-well what the main content of any given page are. Regardless of how many advertisements, social widgets, cookie overlays, or other distractions there are; humans can always spot the actual content. Reading mode maybe not so much. This article is part two in a series on web reading…

Amazon is one of the largest and most formidable companies in the world. It’s run with brutal efficiency, a keen focus on keeping its customers happy, and a deep thirst for innovation. Its $50 billion of revenue per quarter makes the company worth more than $850 billion, which is enough to buy…

I'm frequently asked to help run A/B tests at OkCupid to measure what kind of impact a new feature or design change would have on our users. The usual way of doing an A/B test is to randomly divide users into two groups, give each group a different version of the product, then look for differences…

Google has not had any of its 85,000+ employees successfully phished on their work-related accounts since early 2017, when it began requiring all employees to use physical Security Keys in place of passwords and one-time codes, the company told KrebsOnSecurity. A YubiKey Security Key made by Yubico.…

Congratulations, Mr. President: Zuckerberg Secretly Called Trump After The Election Internal documents show Facebook’s own marketing strategy was influenced by what it learned from its valued customer, the Trump campaign. Tyler Comrie for BuzzFeed News In the days following Donald Trump’s election…

The best companies I work with have a heartbeat, they operate on a pace and a cadence and a rhythm that is perceptible to everyone in and around the company. I am not talking about just product and engineering, although you can’t have a company with a heartbeat if you don’t have it in product and…

Today, we’re announcing that Pinterest has entered into an agreement to transfer ownership of Instapaper to Instant Paper, Inc., a new company owned and operated by the same people who’ve been working on Instapaper since it was sold to betaworks by Marco Arment in 2013. The ownership transfer will…

Everyone who has seen The Social Network knows the story of Facebook’s founding. It was at Harvard in the spring semester of 2004. What people tend to forget, however, is that Facebook was only based in Cambridge for a few short months. Back then it was called TheFacebook.com, and it was a…

Robert Galbraith/Reuters Richard Florida Jul 3, 2018 Acclaimed urban geographer Richard Walker puts the Bay Area’s tech boom into historical and social context in his new book. Pictures of a Gone City is the culmination of the life’s work of Richard A. Walker , a professor emeritus of geography at…

Jump to players DockerCon 2018 How do perceptions and stereotypes affect those in the programming community?This talk tells the true story of my physical transformation, and the surprising and drastic ways in which it affected how I was perceived and treated as a programmer. This new perspective…

When she got pregnant, Otisha Woolbright asked to stop lifting heavy trays at Walmart. Her boss said she had seen Demi Moore do a flip on TV when she was nearly full-term — so being pregnant was “no excuse.” Ms. Woolbright kept lifting until she got hurt. When she got pregnant, Rachel Mountis was…

At its heart, AI is computer programming that learns and adapts. It can’t solve every problem, but its potential to improve our lives is profound. At Google, we use AI to make products more useful—from email that’s spam-free and easier to compose , to a digital assistant you can speak to naturally ,…

[As always, I preface any discussion of Amazon and Apple by noting that I own some stock in both companies, and that I worked at Amazon from 1997 to 2004] A lot of folks, especially Apple supporters, like to characterize Amazon as irrational, even crazy, for its willingness to live with low margins.…

The problem with Amazon is not that it doesn’t make a profit, but that you don’t actually know what the profits are. On the face of it, this sounds like an absurd statement - it doesn’t make any profits. After all, look at this chart - massive revenue growth, zero profit. If we’re going to do this…

Yesterday saw three developer-related announcements, two from Apple, and one from Microsoft. The former came as part of Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference keynote : The iOS App Store, which turns 10 next month, serves 500 million weekly visitors, and as of later this week will have…

[DISCLOSURE: As always when I write about Amazon, I'll note I worked there from 1997-2004 and that I still own some shares in the company. I still have many friends who work there, though I have no more idea what Amazon is working on now than any of you in the public.] With every quarterly earnings…

Through various methods, Silicon Valley has drilled into the minds of entrepreneurs the concept of product/market fit. Marc Andreessen says it’s the only thing that matters , and Brian Balfour has an amazing series of posts that talk about how to find it. But what happens after you find…

"It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle." - Sun Tzu My…

Essential Products Inc., a startup co-founded by Android creator Andy Rubin that launched last year to great fanfare, is considering selling itself and has canceled development of a new smartphone, according to people familiar with the matter. The startup has hired Credit Suisse Group AG to advise…

President Trump has personally pushed U.S. Postmaster General Megan Brennan to double the rate the Postal Service charges Amazon.com and other firms to ship packages, according to three people familiar with their conversations, a dramatic move that probably would cost these companies billions of…

Image Gas prices on display last week in New York. A rise in the price of oil is likely to be passed along to consumers in the months ahead. Credit Mark Lennihan/Associated Press For years, the world economy has been trapped in a low-inflation, low-interest-rate rut. Yet the latest shifts in global…

Glenn Harvey I could only have seen it there, on the waxed hardwood floor of my elementary-school auditorium, because I was young then, barely 7 years old, and cable had not yet come to the city, and if it had, my father would not have believed in it. Yes, it had to have happened like this, like…

"They’re doing it more blatantly now. They know they’re not going to get in trouble or get arrested." Eric Risberg / AP Syringes are scattered in the remains of a tent city along Division Street in San Francisco. Mark Farrell had just stepped off a train and was walking through San Francisco's Civic…

A massive storm in the Alps took climbers and skiers by surprise over the weekend and has killed more than a dozen people so far. The storm followed several weeks of warmer-than-usual weather. The blinding fog and icy winds dropped temperatures to below freezing levels and caught many people on the…

Dante Zedd can barely recognize Clawson, the West Oakland neighborhood he’s lived in for more than three decades. He calls Clawson Dogtown, a nickname he says was earned because of the stray dogs that once roamed the streets nuzzling for food. The dogs barking in Dogtown these days are on leashes or…

RSS and the Open Web This post is not about the day to day operations of The Old Reader or anything of that nature. It’s about how our team came to get involved with RSS and how we see the future of this application and technology that we value so highly. As a long time user of RSS and Google…

Posted by on May 22, 2012 Last week, Owen Thomas wrote a flattering article over at Business Insider on how we handle errors and mistakes at Etsy. I thought I might give some detail on how that actually happens, and why. Anyone who’s worked with technology at any scale is familiar with failure.…

April 08, 2018 · 3 minute read (After trying to shine on a light on some inconsistencies of Apple’s doing , it seems only fair to give Google the same treatment.) Like most of you (I presume), I’ve used Gmail for many years. In an industry where products can too often feel fleeting or unreliable, I…

In this op-ed, Lauren Michele Jackson tackles the recurring use of black people as reaction GIFs and its implications in terms of broader “digital blackface.” Adore or despise them, GIFs are integral to the social experience of the Internet. Thanks to a range of buttons, apps, and keyboards, saying…